The movers came a week ago and delivered all of our furniture from the storage unit to the belfry house. Since then, Jonathan and I have been carrying box after box of heavy books every day from the rustic farmhouse to the belfry house. I am too old for this.

How did I end up with so much stuff? We got rid of so many possessions when we left Colorado -- so many trips to the ARC, so many donations to the library, so much furniture put out on the curb marked "free." So much left behind -- we came here with only two suitcases and two carry-on bags. And yet I've spent all week carrying boxes of books around. I don't understand how my stuff has once again metastasized in this unholy way. It's a complete mystery and I said as much to Andrea in the bookstore when I was shopping in there yesterday.

There seem to be people who live in their storage units.

During the day, these people keep their doors open and we can see as we go past that the units are furnished inside with comfy chairs and wall art -- places where they can go about their business or their hobbies or where they can just relax for a while with a good book. 

It is a strange society that we live in now that this shadow world exists, this hidden village of the not-quite-completely dispossessed. I have no idea where the inhabitants of Storagia go at night -- perhaps to homes, perhaps nowhere. During the day, they seem happy enough. 

A couple of weeks ago, one of our neighbors was sitting on his threshold playing the guitar -- a lovely rendition of "Here Comes the Sun." He played very well, as far as I could tell (which is not at all). Yesterday, he reported that there have been a series of break-ins on our hallway. Sure enough, the metal bolt that keeps each individual door shut and to which the actual lock is attached on the unit directly across from his had been cut open with bolt cutters. 

The guy (whom we call "Santa Man" because he does, in fact, look like Santa Claus and for all we know Santa summers in Colorado, where he has plenty of time to hone his guitar skills -- also, he refers to himself as "Santa" and may not be kidding) said that "some really valuable guns" had been stolen from one of the units, which makes the whole "there are people living in their storage units and apparently they are armed" thing as American as possible. Jonathan is concerned because now, he says, the thieves are armed -- as if there was even the slightest possibility that they weren't already armed before. I'm only surprised that they had the wherewithal to take someone else's guns given the number of guns they were probably already carrying themselves. Meanwhile, the gigantic American flag flying on a flagpole outside is at half-mast.

I don't worry too much about our stuff being stolen -- the photo albums and baby shoes and used books and mementos of our dearly departed Spotty have no re-sale value. Nevertheless, I do not want our unit broken in to and these things that are precious only to us destroyed in any way.

Our next door neighbor was around yesterday and we agreed that too many people are owned by their property rather than the other way around and that we are only building prisons for ourselves with all this stuff we accumulate. Then she happily took a dozen ceramic plant pots that I have have gathered over the years back to her house.

A lot of action here at the house this week. The contractor has come and given us an estimate -- 6000 clams to get everything done. The landscaper ditto -- 10,000 clams. That's a lot of clams before we even get to the part where new paint and wallpaper are installed by someone who actually knows what they're doing (i.e., not me). I prefer to think of the cost in clams rather than in dollars because that makes it seem more palatable.

It also makes me much more reconciled to the idea of selling the house and never again seeing the ineffable quality of light in the boys' old room. At 16,000+ clams, those are some pretty f-able sunbeams.

We are at the stage now of donating furniture -- a big chair, a big table, a little refrigerator, other things that seemed like a good idea at the time. This is a happy part of the moving process if only because someone other than us (strong young whippersnappers from the ARC, presumably) will be the ones to lift it all up.

I was really elated yesterday to find that the rolling cart which had disappeared from the storage facility for the past month has now returned. It was the best news of my entire week. This says something profound about my life this week.

What it says is: "For someone supposedly so passionate about Marxist theory, I sure own a lot of shit."

 I am sitting in my office right now. The northern light from my big window is lovely and serene. There are no books on the shelves in here anymore. There are no pictures of the children around. Almost everything has been taken down from the corkboard so that there is nothing left except ghost shadows left from so many years of being faded by the sun. No one else is around and it is so quiet that I can hear the clock ticking. I am waiting for time to go to class.

The feeling of waiting is particularly pronounced in this moment, but it is there -- more or less -- all the time now. Our friend the electrician did not show yesterday to prepare us for our inspection exam. There was a scheduling snafu and now he is coming next week instead. We are waiting.

We have almost completely sorted through the books and clothes; we don't go to the storage unit every day anymore. The other things in the house can't go yet because we are still living here, still using them. I did get a wild notion last Tuesday (brought on by having attended the Chair's Meeting last Monday) that we could go ahead and store some of our less necessary furniture, so I took away a little table we had in the bathroom. Then I came back and wandered around forlornly for a while holding my hairbrush in my hand and realizing that I had nowhere to put it down.

I made a bunch of origami swans to put on my office shelves because the emptiness seemed so sad.

Today, in anticipation of the plumbing inspector's exciting visit planned for tomorrow, I decided to make a quick run to the storage unit to stash one wicker chair and a bushel basket full of seashells (such are my irreplaceable treasures) to get them out of the way.

Unfortunately, when I got there I noticed a fine pale yellow dust covering the lock to our unit and the hallway outside it. "Huh," I said to myself, while nevertheless going about my business.

Unfortunately, when I lifted the door of our storage unit, a rain of this yellow dust fell down on me.

Unfortunately, when this happened, I looked up to see what was going on.

Unfortunately, I reflexively opened my mouth as I did so.

Unfortunately, as a consequence I got a big mouthful of pale yellow dust, which tasted quite bitter.

Unfortunately, someone had accidentally set off a fire extinguisher in our hallway and sprayed it all around. The dried residue was the pale yellow dust that was now all over the place -- including inside my mouth.

Unfortunately, that shit is toxic.

The joy of the storage place is, unfortunately, beginning to wane.

For a long time, I didn't have a winter coat. I thought I had a winter coat, but that is because I grew up in Arkansas. And what is a heavy winter coat in the South is merely a light jacket in the North. I discovered this, to my chagrin, in the midst of the very first ever blizzard of my life when I sallied excitedly forth to get donuts and ended up, shivering and breathless and stunned, taking shelter in a subway station beneath the streets of Boston. I was so traumatized by my newfound knowledge that I immediately bought a very long, very puffy down coat in a lovely shade of plum and spent the rest of that winter dressed as an ambulatory purple mattress.

I mention this because after eight years of living in temperate North Carolina and forgetting my hard-won New England lessons, I moved with my little baby to the Colorado Rocky Mountains high and promptly almost froze us both to death. 

Fortunately, my friend Andrea came over to the house, saw what I thought was a winter comforter on the bed where I was huddling with my infant on icy December nights, and immediately went back to her house around the corner and returned with a heavy, thick, real winter comforter that made all the difference in the world. I still have it here.

I also have a million (rough estimate) other blankets, quilts, comforters, afghans, and throws that I have hoarded up with great diligence for 26 years now. In my defense, we did lose power for several hours once about 20 years ago, so all of this is very reasonable.

Today I made two enormous lawn-and-leaf bags -- one for the ARC and one for the animal shelter -- filled with extraneous warm bed coverings to give away.

It's a little embarrassing to discover that I had so many. It's also a little embarrassing to admit how many I still have left. But although colloquial expression has it that Hell is burning hot, Southerners and readers of Dante know that, in actual fact, Hell is freezing cold. The prudent among us, aware of the states of our own souls, prepare accordingly.

Well, this is delightful. The word on the street is that you are supposed to save all your financial records, etc., for seven years. Or one hundred and seven years. Whatever will fit in your basement, apparently. It's unclear.

In any case, I have spent an exhilarating two hours going through just some of them, but now I have decided to stop so that the exquisite joy of sorting and shredding can last longer, drawing it out like a lingering kiss or the last piece of a particularly decadent chocolate cake. I would hate to do it all today and thus deprive myself of this rarefied bliss tomorrow. And probably the next day. And the next day. And the day after that, too, I'm guessing.

Jesus. The pleasure just never fucking ends.

 

I am stupid. 

I had forgotten that things do not rush forward in Italy. There is no unseemly hurry. There is no frenetic scurrying about. There is, instead, a gracious and stately procession through time. It is one of the things that we treasure most about Italian culture. It is one of the reasons that we are moving there.

That is all to say that we have not yet managed to rent the rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener. We have merely begun the conversation. There will be many days (or even weeks) during which we will continue to discuss. These will be pleasant conversations, but they will not be speedy conversations. Thus was the Renaissance made. One must respect the Renaissance and settle in for the long haul. Pull up a comfy chair.

In the meantime, I continue to pack boxes of books and cart them in loads to the storage unit. There is nothing that encourages minimalism like physically lifting up into the air every single object that you own. As this process moves forward, as I tote more heavy boxes around, I somehow find that fewer and fewer of my books are actually all that necessary to my future life. It is a hard discipline, but salutary.

A friend of mine once moved apartments in New York City by putting every single thing she owned into two big trash bags and walking with them through the streets of Brooklyn from her old apartment to her new one. She, of course, was a genius. And also possibly a maniac.

But I have held onto that as a glowing vision of the life well-lived ever since.

The key, I feel, to a successful international move, is to have no possessions. Tragically, I seem to have lost my keys.

So I have rented a storage unit near our house. This seems a little on the premature side since we are not planning to actually leave until the end of summer. But my idea is that, rather than throwing up our hands and throwing everything into a shipping container and fleeing helter-skelter (in the way that I have inevitably moved every time I have ever moved in my entire life before), Jonathan and I will sort through our belongings in a calm and orderly fashion, disposing of everything we do not absolutely need for the rest of our lives, selecting very carefully those items that are precious to us (photo albums, etc.) but that are not immediately necessary and putting them into storage, and ending up on the day before we get on the plane with two perfectly packed suitcases and an empty house to rent out. It is a lovely idea.

So I have started by packing only my extremely necessary books into boxes and stacking them in the boys' bedroom to take to the storage unit as soon as this immanently expected snowstorm is over. So far in about three hours of work, I have filled 12 large boxes with absolutely necessary, cannot live without, must be saved for all eternity books. I swear to god that each and every one of them sparks incredible transcendent joy in me. "Statistical Abstract of the Cook Islands 2002" anyone? Impossible to live without.

Minimalism -- so far, so good!